Italo Survivor’s Guilt

20JFG will shortly be excavating out ‘lost’ Best of 2017 but before we do we have some best of 2018 to bring you.

Lou Rebecca’s self titled EP dropped into our inbox courtesy of Austin’s finest Holodeck Records. There are records that you grow to love and that love is deep and strong for the time it has taken to grow. And then there are records like this where you know, you just know how much you will love this from about 30 seconds in.

Appropriately then, we’re bringing you the first track on the EP which contains the aforementioned first 30 seconds. Synths buried under decades of dust, ultra slick guitar chords, angelic vocals, Hi-NRG basslines. It’s like a manic sampling of 20JFG’s favourite things.

A brief mention must go to the first thing on that list. Those opening synths sound like Eduard Artemyev’s work on Tarkovsky’s Sci-fi films. A haunting reconfiguration of the pure, high-culture of classical music…as the intro to a synth pop record. What’s not to love?

At the end of those 30 seconds the bassline enters, briefly followed by the drum machine, the chorus and we’re away into glorious synth pop.

There’s a vampiric joy in such perfectly polished pop being created in the fracturing world that we currently inhabit. As if this insubstantial yet terrible reality that we’re saddled with has completely evaded pockets of people all over the world. And we can drink of their glorious artistic output and somehow attain a measure of optimism, however fleeting.

Lou Rebecca’s self titled EP came out on Holodeck Records on January 12th. You can get it on tape and 12″ right here. An ‘icy blue’ 12″ was also out on Italians Do It Better but they’re sadly long gone now.